Lara Logan’s story was not a mere journalistic mistake, but a hoax comparable to such legendary frauds as Life magazine’s purchase of the billionaire Howard Hughes’s nonexistent “autobiography” in the seventies and Rupert Murdoch’s similarly extravagant embrace of the bogus Hitler “diaries” in the eighties. In Logan’s case, she perpetrated an out-and-out fictional character: a pseudonymous security contractor who peddled a made-up “eyewitness” account of the murder of four Americans in Benghazi. The point seemed to be to further Benghazi as a conservative political cause (instead, Logan’s hoax boomeranged and extinguished it) and to melodramatically exploit the tragic slaughter of Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues as titillating prime-time network entertainment. Logan’s phony source, who in fact was at a beachside villa and not on site to witness anything, cooked up violent new “details” for the Benghazi narrative that seemed to have been lifted from a Jean Claude Van Damme movie.

Here are a few questions that Logan’s “apology” — every bit as bogus as the story itself — failed to answer. (1) How could Logan (by her own account) have worked “for a year” on this report and not done the elementary cross-checking that allowed Karen De Young of the Washington Post to expose the fraud almost immediately after it aired? Indeed, what was Logan doing during that long year? (2) Why did CBS News trust a reporter with such obvious political agendas? Logan had given an over-the-top red-meat political speech about Benghazi around the time she started pursuing the story a year ago. And she had also maligned the patriotism of the late reporter Michael Hastings when he had the audacity to question the loyalty and judgment of the American General Stanley McChrystal and his cohort in Afghanistan. (3) What was the relationship between Logan, her source, and the source’s publisher, which is also owned by CBS?…

Mr. Charles P. Pierce has been all over that, discussing “Spies in the House of Journalism”:

… Threshold, which is run by the inexcusable Mary Matalin, exists only so that the CBS corporation can break off a piece of the lucrative rube market. It exists primarily to produce and sell wingnut propaganda. It exists so that otherwise unpublishable conservatives won’t scream and yell about how nasty liberal publishing elites are keeping them down. Through a combination of corporate cowardice and corporate avarice, the long march of the “Liberal Media” hoax has resulted in an independent information economy totally devoted to weaponized bullshit. The idea that a lunatic faker like Jerome Corsi isn’t yet reduced to stapling his writings to lamp posts but, instead, gets actual book deals under the umbrella of a legacy house like Simon and Schuster makes the whole thing kind of a mad masterpiece when you think about it. But it extends beyond Matalin and it extends beyond CBS and this one story.

For example, Jonathan Karl is a very prominent figure at ABC News. Occasionally, he sits in for The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs. Karl is a product of a network of conservative media organizations financed by the same essential group of sugar daddies that have financed the network of rightwing think-tanks and intellectual chop shops that traces its own history back to the famous “Powell memo,” which recommended that conservatives do that very thing. These organizations do not train people in journalism. They train them in propaganda. This should be as red a flag as there is to anyone doing the hiring at a major news operation. However, very few of those people want to stand the gaff of refusing to hire someone trained in propaganda to do the news. (And, not for nothing, CBS, but having previously worked at Fox News in any capacity should have been a career-killer in legitimate journalism. It certainly shouldn’t have been a ticket to the Bigs the way it apparently was at 60 Minutes.)…

Through that same marriage of corporate cowardice and corporate avarice, the CBS empire decided to give Mary Matalin a toy publishing house. This happened to be the suspension vehicle through which the current hoax was injected into the network’s bloodstream until it finally erupted into the pustulating sore that is the current situation. Oh, and Lara Logan should be suspended. Yesterday.

Good thing Rich “Caligula’s Horse” Cohen has just pharfed out some particularly indefensible words, or else the Media Village Idiots might have to pay attention to offenders who weren’t AARP-aged newspaper holdovers with a readership consisting mostly of people looking to be freshly outraged…

https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpg00Anne Lauriehttps://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpgAnne Laurie2013-11-13 22:18:322013-11-13 22:18:32BenghazAAAIIEEEE!: Ratfvckers All the Way Down

Stop insulting Caligula’s poor horse that way. It’s not his fault the guy holding the reins was a completely insane fuckwit. Likewise WRT the WaPo’s racist fuckwit. No horse deserves that kind of stigma.

@Anne Laurie: Well, it’s not like that’s anything new. But that makes Cohen, et al., Caligula, not the poor animal saddled with the name and rep. After all, it’s Cohen and his fellow Stepford Villagers who are the kingmakers Senator-makers (and makers of much else that’s wrong with the country, like our shitty excuse for “public discourse”).

CBS, Simon & Shiester and Mary Magdeline, can still recoup some coup here. Just hang in there until Black Friday and then push the book as ” an excellent Xmas banana hammock stuffer for the Wingnut in your life”.

The failure of liberals to see the Benghazi scandal as worse than Watergate+Katrina+WWII+Sauron getting the ring just proves how much they don’t understand the realities of Obama’s Ultimate Evilness. And how in the world could anyone doubt the credibility of Lara Logan? She has an English accent, for god’s sake! What more do you people need?

@Aji: Cohen’s never had any effect on the discourse, except as what Dave Weigel calls a “outrage muppet”. His entire career is being the EvenTheLiberal who acts as the distraction when there’s something egregious the “serious media” doesn’t want to talk about — like getting everybody riled about his ‘of course all us normal folk have reason to be afraid of black teenagers’ Opinion, rather than perhaps allowing an actual discussion of stop & frisk policies to break out. He’s the designated rodeo clown at the media circus.

@Anne Laurie: Maybe not how you and I would define “discourse.” But as far as what society as a whole regards as “public discourse?” They’re it. They set the frame, define the terms, drive the [faux] discussion, and close off anything that might be discomfiting to their cushy little sinecures and privileged little lives.

Which is why we don’t actually have a public discourse in this country. We have a corporate-owned and -run word brothel with a pimp-to-hooker ratio of at least 1:1.

And how in the world could anyone doubt the credibility of Lara Logan? She has an English accent, for god’s sake! What more do you people need?

I have to say I thought she was an excellent reporter during the Iraq invasion. And, she was absolutely fearless in some tough situations. She did make her bones there. But since then something has happened to her. You can even see it in her posture and appearance on the almost apology tour. Probably, like the others, it’s all about the money now.
She’s South African btw.

Everytime I hear wingnuts go on about Benghazi, I think of Dubbya or the National Geographic docs in some African country with some tribe in traditional garb doing a tribal dance banging away with the spears chanting “Bengha- Bengha-zee, Bengha-zee Bengha- Bengha-zee, Bengha-zee Bengha- Bengha-zee, Bengha-zee….” Kind of my version of keep on fcuking that chicken.

@maya: I hate to say this but maybe it has to do with the Egypt attack. I can totally understand somebody completely but irrationally turning against a group of people, if they were physically attacked by one of the group..

The section on Davies’ meeting with the FBI is full of awkward prose and comes off as wildly unrealistic, something that should’ve set off alarm bells among veteran CBS news gatherers who say they did a yearlong deep dive into the Benghazi story. Davies describes how a five-person team—three FBI agents, a State Department staffer, and “a lady in her late fifties who introduced herself as a head prosecutor from New York”—visited him at his residence in Wales* after the attack.

The most insane part is when the nameless “head prosecutor from New York” and the FBI agent act like a therapist and a mother to Davies. You really have to read it.

@jheartney: Agreed. I didn’t listen to Air America because I don’t like talk radio. I don’t like podcasts. I don’t like audio books. Blogs at least are interactive. Books and magazines can be picked up and put down. Passively sitting and listening to someone yammer on, no thank you.

I read a summary of Issa’s should-have-been rap sheet recently. Now I think of him as ‘Hit and Run Missa’ That last bit in honor of his Mother of All Nothing scandal mongering since Obama administration started.

Edit: but hey, he’s very beezee, and so it’s OK. Man, I don’t think I could get away with c.r.a.p. like that.

But Logan’s mea culpa said nothing about other weaknesses in the report that a line-by-line review of the broadcast’s transcript reveals. McClatchy turned to LexisNexis, a legal research service, for a transcript of the broadcast because the segment no longer appeared on CBS sites.

The report repeatedly referred to al Qaida as solely responsible for the attack on the compound and made no mention of Ansar al Shariah, the Islamic extremist group that controls and provides much of the security in restive Benghazi and that has long been suspected in the attack. While the two organizations have worked together in Libya, experts said they have different aims – al Qaida has global objectives while Ansar al Shariah is focused on turning Libya into an Islamic state.

It is an important distinction, experts on those groups said. Additionally, al Qaida’s role, if any, in the attack has not been determined, and Logan’s narration offered no source for her repeated assertion that it had been.

“I think there are definitely connections, but I am not sure there is command and control” between al Qaida and Ansar al Shariah, said Aaron Y. Zelin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who studies insurgent activity in North Africa.

Logan claimed that “it’s now well established that the Americans were attacked by al Qaida in a well-planned assault.” But al Qaida has never claimed responsibility for the attack, and the FBI, which is leading the U.S. investigation, has never named al Qaida as the sole perpetrator. Rather, it is believed a number of groups were part of the assault, including members and supporters of al Qaida and Ansar al Shariah, as well as attackers angered by a video made by an American that insulted Prophet Muhammad. The video spurred angry protests outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo hours beforehand.

In a Sept. 12, 2012, statement about the attack, Ansar al Shariah suggested its members had participated, though the group said it did not order the assault.

The more I hear about this the more this guy sounds like Jeff “The Red Rascal” Redfern from Doonesbury. Even his publisher got that he was just making the stuff up though.

It’s asking a lot to want people to believe that CBS was actually so obtuse that they believed this clown. Much more likely simply agenda-driven, the fantasy novel he was pushing as if real fit the right-wing story they wanted to tell.

their beloved conservatism is such a failure. it let bin laden escape, it dragged the country into another viet nam, it let al qaeda survive, it drove the economy to collapse.

then comes along a black community organizer with a funny name. He proceeds to catch bin laden, decimate al qaeda, end the quagmire, and save the auto industry and prevent a 2nd great depression. And just for shit’s and giggles, he frees the slaves teh ghey.

It just devastated their the little white supremacist world view, which was already addled by inferiority complexes.

they”re so desperate to reclaim some self esteem, they grab on to anything, no mater how trumpeted up, in hope of dragging him down, if only in their to deluded minds.

Just look at last week’s election in virginia. they lost. did they admit defeat, no. they can’t handle the truth. instead they spun some pathetic story about how they really won because they only lost by 3 pts.

What’s most tragic about all this Benghazi nonsense is how successfully it has obscured the fact that Obama performed incredibly regarding Libya, handling it about as best as it could be handled. As he’s done with Syria as well.

We’re out of Iraq, leaving Afghanistan, the man has done so much to calm the crazed, burning world that was W.’s terms. And yet, all we hear: Whatever the Repukes want to scream about, endlessly.

@Redshirt: I agree taht Obama has done very well in foreign policy. Of course, I may be a little more interventionism friendly than some. But he has done it well, with a light touch, and the involvement of allies.

All the mouth-breathers screaming “this is Obama’s Iran-hostage-crisis!” had it very precisely wrong. In Iran, the revolutionary government supported the attack on the embassy (albeit after the fact). In Libya, it got a bunch of its guards killed defending the compound and then offered its cooperation in the investigation. In Iran, we had the mobs outraged at us for the last quarter-century and thrilled to see their country finally sticking it to America. In Libya, we got the big “we loved Chris Stephens!” demonstrations and, at least in one case, a jihadi compound suspected of involvement in the attack whose members were thrown out of the building by an angry mob a few days later. It’s been the exact opposite of the Iranian Revolution, so far.

I guess I was aware that there are whole publishing imprints targeting the “rube market.” But I avoid that garbage and regard it as the moran-fringe — books for the Tea base people who go to Palin book signings, but who couldn’t coherently explain the policy positions they support if you paid them. But when “authoritative” CBS aggressively gets into the game of publishing phony information for profit, our culture is seriously teetering on the edge.

@mai naem: This is strangely under-attended. I work with PTSD. This looks like PTSD, with an exploitation twist. If I were treating Logan, I’d consider putting her on suicide watch. Her fall will be hard.

For those who think this is over, I heard Drew Pearson telling Suzanne Malvaux on CNN that there are still serious questions Congress members have about Benghazi that must be answered! She seemed to agree.

I didn’t follow it that closely at the time, but is there proof, beyond Logans own account, that she was sexually assaulted/gang raped in Egypt? Not trying to be inflammatory but just wondering now that she been exposed as a liar with an agenda. Interesting too that she was the only “American” journalist present when US soldiers pulled down the statue of Saddam, and that turned out to be a piece of propaganda too. All of a sudden her Egypt assault story has a whiff of Jessica Lynch to me.

@Gypsy Howell: I don’t know, but I guess, while I understand the curiosity, I don’t want to know. She’s tied up a very nice noose that fits the neck of her career just perfectly, and handed it to us, with her Benghazi fraud. So I don’t see the point in gilding the lily. She should be taken down, and there’s plenty of ammo in the weapon already without delving back into the Egypt story. It’s too sensitive, and even going there as delicately as possible and trying really hard not to be inflammatory, could invite people to sympathize with her as being picked on. I don’t even want people to be able to say that experience may be part of the cause of her agenda and actions now – it’s a horrific, awful thing she went through, but it’s no excuse for this sort of journalistic crime. I’d just as soon the average person on the street not even know her backstory, only that she perpetrated a completely fraudulent story and passed it off on the entire country on 60 Minutes to push a conspiracy theory agenda.